Move number 17, in a time of Covid: The Corona Chronicles 6

A friend of mine, on reading this old post, about my 16th house move in 18 years, said she felt a little bit sick at the thought. Well, friend, if you are reading this, I think you may be about to vomit, because we have spent four and a half years at our current flat, and, knock me down with a Covid-infected feather, we are moving again. Him Indoors and I have never made it to five years at any of our places of residence since we left home in 1997 and 1998 respectively, so, you know, we thought, let's move house during Ramadan and a global pandemic, because we are MENTAL.

I have shared the above picture with you, taken this morning, because Him Indoors pulled off the miracle of completing the complicated admin involved in getting the keys to the new place today, despite everything that is going on, so the movers are coming at 9am tomorrow. You read that right.

The movers are coming tomorrow.

The. Movers. Are. Coming. Tomorrow.

As you can see, we have packed not a jot, because we are taken up with schooling (me) and work (him). Luckily moving is a pretty common occurrence in Dubai, what with one thing and another, so moving companies will do the lot, pack everything, right down to the 10 year old novelty pants stuffed at the back of your underwear drawer, and then pull down your curtains and put them back up in the new place. So it's fairly easy. In normal times. Now, of course, is not normal. Normally, one of us would supervise and the other would take the kids off somewhere, but there is no somewhere because everywhere is closed.

The malls are open but kids under 12 are not allowed in them, and even if they were, entertainment options such as soft play and cinemas are closed. You are allowed to take them out for a walk. For one hour. Parks are closed. Swimming pools are closed. What the hell are we going to do with a five year old and a one year old while we get our worldly possessions crammed into a lorry and driven 500 yards down the street to our new, bigger apartment? I have literally no idea, but I think it is going to involve going for the obligatory hour long walk when the movers first arrive, then taking the kids to the new place to run around until the movers get there, then bringing the kids back to the old place to play cleaning so the movers can do their thing at the new place.

Why the hecking heck of all f***s are we doing this to ourselves? Well, there was a half-hearted plan to move to an apartment nearer DB1's school because the commute is a pain at 7am and there is a school bus option, but it goes all around the houses, and it would take her the best part of two hours to do a half-hour journey on the way home.

This did not happen because of some tedious stuff to do with the landlord changing their minds about notice periods needed to move from one development to another, even though the landlord owns both. But, we did have the option to move somewhere bigger within the same development, and because there are currently five of us in a two-bed apartment, which, as Him Indoors would say, is not premium, we decided to go for it because if we don't do it now, we won't get the option until the same time next year, rents are at an all time low, so we are getting a bargain, and the alarming combination of restrictions plus UAE summer means we are spending a heck of a lot of time indoors, so we need more space.

There is also the fact that our unbelievable bellend of a downstairs neighbour has started thumping on the ceiling like a caged gorilla when DB1 does her 15 minute PE lesson twice a week, I can only assume because she has the temerity to to sound like she might be having fun and these people are the enemies of joy. It is, of course, beyond him to give us a tiny bit of a noise-based leeway for a child who is literally imprisoned in a two-bed apartment 23 hours per day seven days per week. Of course it is.

Five of us, you say? Have I squeezed out an extra kid without mentioning it? That would be very unlike me. No, our formerly live out nanny has had to become live in for the time being as the Covid restrictions mean she would not be allowed to come and go from our house. As great as our nanny is, it has been somewhat cosy over the past month or so. The new place has an extra bedroom, a little room that I can use as an office. And a store room. A store room! AKA a place where I can throw all the stuff in that I swear I am going to sort out but never get around to, close it and forget about it. This may not sound ideal, but believe me, it will be better than the hourly rages about the fact that my house is full of stuff that I have nowhere to put and there is nowhere I can look without seeing a surface piled up with children's toys, school-related gubbins, lego, old notebooks, stationery, nick-nacks and piles of dust.

This will be fine of course until more stuff makes its way in to fill all the spaces, and the stuff in the store room gradually forms into a monstrous sentient being made up of old wires, forgotten birthday cards, clothes that I am too fat for and old baby paraphernalia that I want to sell but can't because of the restrictions, and crawls out and assumes command of the apartment and makes us all its slaves.

Anyway.

I really should go and do a bit of packing so I do not have to suffer the indignity of a team of movers hurling my ancient nursing bras and piles of dusty desk-based rubbish into the same cardboard box.

Wish us luck. 

How to be a Covid patient without having Covid: The Corona Chronicles 5

Something that has been at the back of my mind since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak here is what will happen if any of us experience any kind of medical issue while hospitals and clinics are busy with Covid-19 patients. Thanks to DB2 and her periodic super high fevers, I found out.

Just over two weeks ago, she started to develop a fever, which happens every other month or so. The familiar scenario of a small, sleepless and cranky child with no appetite emerged, and we survived on coffee for us and regular doses of paracetamol, followed by Nurofen when paracetamol did not even touch the fever, for her.

By Tuesday, she was no better, so I booked an appointment with a pediatrician at a well-known hospital as this has been happening more than I am comfortable with since she was born, with a particularly nasty episode when she was aged six months when she had to be hospitalised. During prior episodes, my local doctor had shrugged her shoulders and said it was most likely her older sister bringing home bugs from school. Well, I reasoned to myself, her older sister has not been near the school for getting on for two months, so something must be up. It did not occur to me to think it might be the c-word, as we have been observing all the lockdown rules.

Starting to feel better.

I asked for a telephone consultation to avoid having to venture out, but the admin staff said no, with a a fever you have to be seen by a doctor. But, once we were there, we were screened for fever and travel history by a security guard on the way in, although the forehead thermometer did not pick up DB2's temperature. Then, the doctor who was assigned to see DB2 would not see us once the nurse established she indeed did had a fever, as he was not seeing any fever patients, due to the risk of him being infected with Covid 19. I understand it, of course, the hospital must operate some kind of system where certain staff members have no contact with potential Covid patients at all to ensure they can keep running in the event of an outbreak among staff, but I did not feel particularly understanding being shunted off to a remote part of the outpatients section and left to wait in a corridor with a sick one year old while they decided what to do.

We were then dispatched to the accident and emergency department, while DB2's fever climbed, so she was given the usual fever reducing medicines and after having the life scared out of her by a doctor in full personal protective equipment of, gown, mask, visor and gloves, and following a series of complicated manoeuvres to get her to give a urine sample, we were sent home with a suspected ear infection and a prescription for Augmentin.

A bit peaky.

It was getting towards the evening by this time and the hospital started to take on an eerie quality as most of the day's outpatients left. There was no busy cafe open to sit and nurse an over priced machine-produced cappuccino and bribe fractious children by feeding them chunks of diabetes-inducing chocolate muffin while waiting for prescriptions.

Perspex screens surrounded the pharmacy, so one had to shout not only through a mask, but through a small gap between screens to be heard. The only people there besides us appeared to be those with acute pain relief needs, and a guy inquiring about a supply of alternative medicine to his usual brand, which was unavailable in the UAE, as he was unable to get back to the USA to see his doctor.

The pharmacists were run off their feet as even though there were relatively few patients, they had to spend much longer than usual on hold to insurers, with some of them on hold to two different insurers for two different patients on two different phones at a time. I expect health insurers are among the busiest people on the planet these days. The pharmacists were in full protective gear of gowns, hairnets, protective glasses, gloves and masks, making communication even harder.

Getting ready to be discharged. It took my until 24 hours after we arrived to realise those cupboard doors open by pressing them inwards. Prior to that, I had been levering them open using hospital cutlery. I was quite sleep deprived. 

While we were waiting to see the triage nurse earlier, we had seen a Covid-19-related episode which I imagine is fairly typical. A crew of a passenger ship turned up in reception, wearing the obligatory protective masks, saying they had been told to come to the hospital to get tested as they had been exposed by a passenger who had contacted them after disembarking to let them know they had tested positive. "We need to get tested so we can find out our status so we can get back to work," the guy in charge told the manager, who had to be summoned after the receptionist told him there were no tests available.

The hospital advised them to stay at home for 14 days to see if symptoms emerge, and then contact the health authority or a clinic if they became serious. Obviously, that would not be possible for a ship's crew on a sailing schedule. The discussions continued back and forth for a while, before the boss got on the phone to try to sort out tests for them. DB2 and I were called to see the nurse before I could earwig enough to find out what their next move was.

Our own hospital experience complete for the time being, we headed home. The kind A and E doctor tried to reassure me that it was most likely nothing to worry about, as even though DB2's big sister has not been near school, the little one could still acquire an infection as the tiny, narrow tubes that make up the pathways inside the ears, throat and urinary tract of a one year old are absolute breeding grounds for bacteria, so the slightest sniffle or incidence of being under the weather can lead to an infection.

On Thursday, after a couple more sleepless nights with fever spikes of nearly 41C, I took her back to A and E, as the doctor said to do so if she did not improve within 48 hours. After a stressful hour waiting for the online movement permits that we were using at the time for everything, and a tearful phone call to the service centre who told me to just go and show the police the "pending" message on my phone if they were to stop me, off we went.

By the time we got to the hospital, DB2 was clinging to me like a limpet and burning up. Even the triage nurse, who had been kind but a little abrupt on my first visit, called her a "poor child", and cleared the route through to the emergency ward as a fever for an extended period is one of the key signs of the c-word.

Intravenous antibiotics were prescribed and those of you with small children who have experienced similar will know how nightmarish that is. It involves two nurses holding down your screaming, sick and distressed baby to put the cannula into their hand. All I could do was bend over the hospital bed with a cartoon playing on my phone, acting like having her hand pierced and strapped to an IV drip was absolutely fine, totally par for the course, and attempting to sing silly songs to distract her while trying not to burst into tears myself.

An X-Ray was taken using a portable machine, to check for Covid-related lung infection, and I was asked to get her to provide another urine sample. I sighed heavily at this. Thanks to her history of high fevers and suspected urine infections, I know by now that getting a toddler to do this basically involves following your nappy off toddler around for hours and gradually getting covered in your own child's p*** as you try time after time collect it, while they employ a series of tactics to outwit you. as follows:

1. The stealth lap pee 

Sitting on parent's lap, waiting until they least expect that familiar warm sensation, usually when they are answering a phonecall or speaking to a doctor, commence peeing making sure parent has no chance of getting the cup ready on time.

2. The wanderer 

Walk around appearing to be reasonably content, with parent following closely behind, get into a corner to squat down and pee, it is even better if you are behind a piece of furniture, so your parent has no chance of catching any pee. Then if you are feeling really special, slip over in it and bang your head immediately afterwards, so your parent has no choice but to scoop up your pee-covered self and comfort you while also standing in a pool of pee aforementioned pee.

3. The stop/starter 

When your parent does succeed in getting the cup under you at the opportune moment, immediately desist from peeing and burst into tears, hold on to remaining pee if possible to maximise the chance of actually getting a urine infection if you don't already have one.

4. The p***taker

The A and E doctor could see I was about to lose it, particularly when DB2 decided to go and pee in the corner of the cubicle while I was busy Googling "how to get a toddler to give a urine sample" on my phone. Of course she did.

The doctor took pity and let me use the pediatric urine bag which fits in the nappy and does the collection job all by itself.

No such luck on the Thursday night. DB2's blood test results came back, and her infection markers were extremely high. In addition, having eaten pretty much nothing all day, she decided right before the cannula was fitted that it was a good time to eat a tangerine that I had shoved into my bag before leaving the house. Unfortunately, she then got so upset that a bit of orange went down the wrong way, and she started coughing violently, barely able to catch her breath. I could feel the tension in the room when she started displaying a second key Covid symptom.

So we were admitted. The nurse saw my face and said don't worry about the urine test, just get her to do it when you get to the ward. She was swabbed for Covid-19, so it turned out tests were in fact available in the hospital, the men I had seen in reception earlier in the week obviously did not meet the criteria. We were then taken up to the children's ward.

As we arrived, the duty doctor told me that they suspected she had Covid-19, despite the fact that I had no idea how she could have caught it if she did as we had been at home as directed by the UAE government.

I am not going to keep you in suspense, she tested negative and we received the results on the Sunday morning, one week after she first became ill. The stronger intravenous antibiotics did the trick and sorted out whatever infection it was, so by day six, Saturday morning she was her old self, wondering around the hospital room, shouting "Bah" at the top of her voice, twerking to the Hokey Cokey played repeatedly on YouTube and eating handfuls of hospital pasta bolognese while covering as much of the hospital room as possible in the sauce.

Settling down for a two and a half hour nap at the exact point we were meant to be being discharged, because that's how she rolls. It was probably her longest sleep during our entire stay, including night-time. 

The time prior to this was pretty grim. As a suspected Covid patient, she was not allowed to leave the room, so neither was I, and we were allowed no visitors. The doctors for the most part did not come in at all, but called us on the room telephone when they needed to speak to us, the nurses, cleaners or ladies serving food were dressed in full protective gear, and it was only towards the end of the 66 or so hours that we were there that DB2 found that any less terrifying.

And then the urine sample. The saga of the goddamn sample. I am not joking when I say it took me the best past of 40 hours before I managed to collect it from her. The consultant in charge refused to let us use the urine collection bag in her nappy because he said they risked the urine being contaminated and therefore gave false positives. Far be it from me to suggest that they could test two or three samples if they were so worried about the false results, and save carers of children hours and hours of getting covered in gallons of pee.

After 24 hours of worry and very little sleep and being stuck in a stuffy hospital room with a toddler who was still sick and feverish and chasing her round and round with a small plastic cup, both of us getting more tired, stressed and upset in the process, I ended up demanding to see the doctor and had a row with her, which ended with me angrily refusing to let her ask the nurses to insert a tube into DB2's bladder collect a sample that way. I am not going to recount the conversation here, as it was not my proudest moment, but the general gist was "over my dead body will you do that to my child".

The nurse came to see me shortly after that, and said forget about it now, it's too late for the laboratory anyway, just try again in the morning. And sure enough, once DB2 was feeling better, by half way through the next morning, the job was done.

Our pseudo-Covid experience was mercifully short and obviously it turned out fine. But the stress of being alone in a room like that with a sick child is not one I would wish to repeat. She is fully recovered now, although various test results did not tell us what kind of infection it was that gave her such a high fever this time. We have been told that the super high fevers are not a particular worry, some children have them, some don't. It's just that some bodies react differently to illness than others. Although we have been told to keep an eye out for any similar episodes along with unexplained bruises or any more losses of appetite.

I do not regret taking her to hospital as the need for intravenous antibiotics showed that she was sick enough to be admitted,  and that I didn't expose her to potential Covid risk unnecessarily. I had read an article not long before she got sick saying that if your child was sick enough to need hospital treatment, you should not hesitate in taking them even if you are nervous about the the virus as clinics have measures in place to protect them. Although I was anxious about taking her, and I felt the staff were a bit to quick to assume it was Covid-19, they only had my word for the fact that she had not been exposed, and of course they cannot be too careful.

Seriously, though, friends, you need to avoid exposing yourself to even the suspicion of having this illness if you can. DB2 and I got off lightly, obviously, but being stuck in a room only visited by people who look like they are working on a nuclear waste cleanup is no joke, even for 68 hours.

Disclaimer. This is a subject hat comes up in one form or another reasonably regularly on here, but it is rather more serious at this rather difficult time. I have access to good private healthcare, I live in a rich country, even though I am as poor as a church mouse compared to some of the super rich types that frequent Dubai, I am unimaginably privileged compared with many both in the UAE and around the world. This blog is in no way a complaint about the standard of healthcare in my adopted homeland, and I realise that I very, very lucky to have healthcare cover at all, and no, I do not think I am badly off compared to those who are very sick, dying, died of or have lost loved ones to Covid-19, so please don't send me angry messages about that. Thanks.

The inevitable postponement of Expo 2020: The Corona Chronicles 4

The last few weeks saw the the news that Expo 2020 Dubai, the mega event world fair that was due to open in October, is to be postponed. As far as the international press is concerned, a one-year delay is a done deal, but the local press are saying a postponement is at the proposal stage.

For some context for those of you who have never set foot in the UAE, I wrote about the announcement of Dubai's winning bid, at what was a very different time in my life, and not just because there wasn't a global pandemic at the time. We were pre-kids, we were still running half marathons, we were living in a high-rise flat in Downtown, which was the venue for some corking new year parties thanks to a killer view of the Burj Khalifa and its gigantic new year fireworks display.

My shaky Blackberry shot of the Burj Khalifa, the night the winning Expo 2020 bid was announced, taken from our apartment in 8 Boulevard Walk. You would not be able to take a similar shot today as Emaar built several more towers in the gap between our old building and the Burj since then.   

I was in the midst of a short-lived semi-career change, working in-house as a copywriter for a real estate agency. My time there mirrored many in Dubai's experience in the run-up to and aftermath of the Expo bid. I was hired just after the win, there was an inevitable surge in interest in real estate, in both residential and commercial sectors, and then in June, the usual summer slowdown was not the usual slowdown, but a bit of a slump, and by November, I was seven months pregnant with DB1, and "made redundant" from my job. I say "made redundant", because  they brought in a younger, distinctly more male person, while I was still working there, to do my job, which is another story, connected to the fact that employee rights are not exactly top of the agenda for many. 

But I'm not bitter.

Anyway.

You can read in my old blog post, linked above, and here again, how Him Indoors and I looked at each other and sighed wearily when the winning bid was announced, because we knew that it would mean another spike in rental prices, and that we would be turfed out of our apartment by another unscrupulous landlord keen to get round rental increase caps of 20 per cent and find tenants willing to pay more.

It is also very easy to be cynical about Expo as the world now is unimaginably different from the one that saw the first World's Fair, which took place back in dear old Blighty in 1851. If you'll pardon me stating the bleedin' obvious: back then, if you wanted to see great innovations and inventions, the only real way to do so was to travel to see them in real life, whereas today you can of course see anything you like at the swipe of a smartphone without leaving the comfort of your armchair.

But, hosting the expo is a great source of national pride for the UAE. It is the first time an event of its kind has ever been held anywhere in the region, and the country has made a huge investment in creating a purpose-built expo site to the south of the city, and of course there is the small matter of the claims that the event will bring 25 million visitors to the UAE during its six month duration.

With the airport currently closed except for a fraction of its usually scheduled flights, entry suspended even for pre-existing visa holders, and the emirate of Dubai living with some of the tightest restrictions to prevent the spread of Covid-19, it was of course inevitable that it would be postponed. Talk of a vaccine for this miserable disease is apparently a long way off, and it seems unlikely it will be ready for widespread use by October this year, so it would be a kind of madness for it to go ahead.

While its cancellation may not have the same global impact as that of the Tokyo Olympics, it is big news for the UAE, and for those who livelihoods depend on it going ahead in October. It is not for nothing that the event was being marketed earlier this year as the world's greatest show.

On broader level, there are many millions of us, Him Indoors and I included, whose livelihoods depend on things returning to some kind of normality at some point soon. But, I remember saying to him in the early stages of the outbreak as it began to spread from country to country: "Can't people just stop s***ing all over the world?" And surely that will have to be the case if a vaccine is not identified, will it not? Perhaps regular air travel will once again become the preserve of the super rich. If Greta Thunberg is not enough to convince the great and the good that burning tons of fossil fuel for the sake of attending a meeting or a conference that could easily take place online, or for the sake of "winter sun" or having a place to drink beer at a third of the price of one's homeland on a stag night, then maybe the risk of contracting a potentially fatal strain of viral pneumonia, or passing it on to a vulnerable loved one, is.

Maybe we are about to see the last of these global events. After all, many of us who were told, no, it is simply not possible for you to work from home, found that suddenly, when there is no other option, it is perfectly possible after all, albeit with the help of the dreaded Zoom. And my inbox is stuffed full of press releases about events and conferences that are being cancelled and hastily reconvened online.

There is no doubt that when the expo does eventually go ahead, it will be enormous, brash, bursting to the seams with the evidence of hefty quantities spent on staging it. But perhaps, in its efforts to host the expo to host all expos, the UAE has inadvertently done just that. Perhaps when the new normal is not getting on a plane at the drop of a hat, experiencing the wonders of an expo is purely something that will take place virtually, and these in real life experiences will be the a thing of the past.